Friday, 28 May 2010

This week I've been busy with traveling and moving, but during the past few days I finally managed to work, so here's what I did:

I started implementing Zeitgeist dataprovider for Chrome (using NPAPI), but this turned out to be quite hard, as after the initial implementation the plugin was working fine in Firefox, but didn't want to show up in Chrome, there weren't any error messages and strace didn't even show Chrome trying to open the dynamic library (and strace -f was hanging)... So it was quite "fun"! Anyway today I managed to make it work and now we have a first version of Chrome extension!

Plan for next week is:

finish the Chrome extension, so it doesn't send multiple events for one website visit as it does now... Also does anyone know how to get document mime-type in Chrome?

if time allows, I'll try to make our new Totem extension to build out of totem tree, which might not be that easy to do (actually I'm not sure it's even possible)

Monday, 24 May 2010

Zeitgeist can already make users lives really easy (see my last Awn + Zeitgeist post), but we don't have to stop there, one of things I'd really like to see would be if applications helped us with this - if the apps expose which URI they are currently working with (which file is currently open / web page currently viewed / ...) we can make very precise queries as to which other files (or contacts, web pages, applications etc.) are related to this URI.

As everyone likes examples imagine that you're working with a spreadsheet and zeitgeist knows that the last time you were working with it you were checking www.sitewithstats.com, had last_years_report.pdf open and were talking to xyz. Therefore it will provide you these options in some kind of menu (or dock / indicator / windicator). Wouldn't it be great?

To make this possible I suggest new X property for windows (let's say it'd be "_NET_WM_CURRENT_URI") and the only thing required by the apps is to set this property when a file is opened and update it when appropriate. If people like this idea I can prepare a patch for gdk (adding gdk_window_set_current_uri_hint) and libwnck (which would expose the property for pagers). Or perhaps there is already something similar what I missed?

Thursday, 6 May 2010

People say that image is worth thousand words, so take a look at this video instead of me saying all those words:

Under the hood there's Awn's window to desktop file matching backed by wncksync (if available). And of course Zeitgeist with a couple of extensions which I'm currently working on.

Before anyone asks, this isn't yet pushed anywhere is now available in a separate awn-extras branch (https://code.launchpad.net/~mhr3/awn-extras/zeitgeist-applet), and will be merged to awn-extras trunk once there's an official release of libzeitgeist and everyone (read awn-testing PPA users) will be able to play with it.